MAXAR’s Initiative Focused on High-Resolution Imagery

US: Maxar Technologies marked the first year of operations for its News Bureau initiative that leverages the power of its high-resolution satellite imagery and analysis for social good and global transparency.

The Maxar News Bureau is a partnership program with trusted media organizations around the world. In the past year, the News Bureau has played a pivotal role in exposing the displacement and killing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; providing indisputable evidence of human trafficking and illegal fishing in an international court case; monitoring the growth of refugee camps in Uganda; chronicling the physical toll of wars in Iraq and Syria; and revealing the devastation of numerous natural disasters, including the California wildfires and hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma.

“High-resolution satellite imagery and analytics are a powerful complement to good journalism, providing indisputable truth at a time when credibility is critical,” said Nancy Coleman, Maxar Vice President of Communications. “Our imagery and expertise provide unmatched quality, currency, and veracity in the form of credentialed content to news organizations. The visual context that we provide puts a compelling spotlight on injustice and human suffering allowing decisions to be made with confidence and is an extension of Maxar’s purpose.”

The News Bureau was formally established in February 2017 by DigitalGlobe, building upon earlier work the company did to enable investigative reporting projects. Most notably, DigitalGlobe provided the “smoking gun” image to the Associated Press (AP) that showed two trawlers loading slave-caught seafood onto a commercial cargo ship. As a result of the Seafood from Slavesinvestigation, more than 2,000 enslaved men we freed, U.S. law was changed and AP was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

“DigitalGlobe provided critical evidence we needed to expose the slave fishing operation and hold the responsible parties accountable for their actions,” said Marjorie Miller, AP Vice President of Global News and Enterprise. “Access to high-resolution satellite imagery has allowed AP to accurately report from parts of the world that are too remote, dangerous or inaccessible to reach in any other way.”

Now as part of a family of industry-leading space and technologies companies under Maxar Technologies, the News Bureau has access to radar satellite imagery from MDA and advanced analytic capabilities from Radiant Solutions. Applications for our unrivaled combined capabilities include broad-area monitoring of illegal fishing, logging and mining; understanding urban development and environmental changes; and gaining real-time insight into dynamic global events using crowdsourcing and social media analytics.

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Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a RADAR system that uses the motion of the vehicle (aircraft, satellite, rail) to Synthetically (simulated) create an Aperture (antenna) and by using RADAR, which generates electromagnetic signals or “pings” to generate a picture or rendering of the terrain below.